C4CC(24): Therefore the land mourns (4)
End of this chapter… possibly a bit dated, but the themes are more relevant than ever, not least as it sets up the conversation about apocalypse next time out.
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The fundamental battle again comes down to discerning the right path, seeking to find wisdom, which means describing and rejecting idolatry. Consider Baal, the Canaanite fertility god. Baal means 'the son of El', where El was the supreme deity. Baal was originally the storm god, the god of thunder and lightening (the equivalent of Thor in the Norse pantheon). The mythology told of a sequence where the different gods conquered each other in turn to represent the turning around of the seasons. Over time, Baal became the dominant figure and he was associated with fertility because the rains allowed the crops to grow. Each area would have its local Baal and the worship of Baal took a very particular form: the worship of a fertility god requires celebrations of fertility and so there was cultic prostitution, orgies, celebrating the human acts of fertilisation in order to “charge up” the god with fertility energy. This is what is criticised strenuously in the Old Testament. Whenever there are instructions about “do not let your daughter become a prostitute” it is to do with this worship of Baal. It is not prostitution in the sense we would understand it today, selling your body for money, it is to do with this fertility worship. The story of Israel coming into Canaan, with God saying you have got to drive out these other people from this land and you are not to inter-marry with them, is about not becoming contaminated with fertility worship.
This is a major theme in the Old Testament because the people of Israel themselves were caught up in the worship of Baals. Even amongst David and Solomon’s children, influences from the Baalite mythology can be discerned in their choice of names. From the archaeological excavations done exploring the practices of the Israelites in the sixth and seventh century BC, there are frequently found little Baals, little Ashteroths, the little fertility gods contained within people's houses. The people of Israel were not exclusively faithful to God. It was an ongoing struggle between the living God and these fertility gods. The attraction of worshipping Baal was the sense of gaining some measure of control or influence over fertility, over the productivity of land – and therefore of the means of life. Similarly, our contemporary Baalism is a desire to control fertility, with the assumption that the world belongs to us. What this means in contemporary systems of agriculture is a systematic and ruthless exploitation of the land.
Imagine telling someone from Monsanto that they should not harvest for the first three years and then the fourth year you should give it to the church! The idea that we must not harvest the whole of the field, the thought that we might leave some of the harvest for those who are poor to come and glean, to be fed from the crumbs from under the table, this is nonsense to our contemporary agri-business industrial complex. There are no crumbs falling from the table of modern agriculture, all is industrially hoovered up. For example, the green revolution in the middle of the twentieth century systematically assessed what were the most productive grain varieties, and replaced those less productive grain varieties with the most productive, and this led to a significant increase in grain harvests. This is one of the ways in which we have been able to feed the population, but what it has meant is an incredible loss of diversity, which has made the crop more vulnerable to pests – and that has led to an arms race between chemical pesticides (with all their problems) and the natural response of the environment. Similarly, with factory farming, where the farming is driven by corporate interests rather than a farmer's own link with and assessment of the animals, any notion of husbandry is abandoned – instead there is a systematic driver of agricultural behaviour and practices where there is no direct relationship with the processes of the world itself. It might make sense financially, it might make sense in terms of corporate interest but it is not something that respects the integrity of the life cycles of the animals. Western agriculture has absorbed the asophism of science and the diseases that these practices breed, such as mad cow disease, are the consequences of the idolatry.
Where agriculture is driven by financial priorities a corporation may have no long term interest in any particular area of land. Think of the deforestation going on in the Amazon, where ranchers come in to grow cattle, most of which goes up to hamburger shops in the West, and there, once the forest has been cut down, the land is fertile for perhaps three years and then gets desertified. This happens because the fertility value of the land has been taken up into the cattle and taken off elsewhere. The land collapses, at which point this slash and burn agriculture moves on to the next bit of forest. This is one of the prime drivers behind deforestation of the Amazon, and it is driven by a commercial logic: it makes sense for a company to pursue this sort of policy, because it provides a greater short term positive cash flow. It is not sustainable in the long term but within the asophic logic of corporate thinking it can make sense. It is essentially strip mining the soil – getting what the company can from it and then moving on, not seeing the soil as something that has its own integrity, that needs to be taken care of, so that the soil takes care of us. This loss of topsoil is not just confined to the poor areas of our world. Over the last forty years some 4.3 million square kilometres of agricultural land has been taken out of production, the equivalent of 30% of the present area of agricultural land.
Scripture teaches that “If you defile the land it will vomit you out” (Leviticus again). This has happened serially over time in different parts of the world. Ancient Babylon is now effectively desert, because the people who lived there extracted the sources unsustainably and when the agricultural base got taken away the civilisation collapsed. Similarly, Rome was hugely impacted by the over-cropping of the hills in what is now called Italy, and the same applied to the Mayans and the inhabitants of Easter Island.
So how are we to live within our world? How are we to live as human creatures within creation? These are questions seeking wise answers. The Christian calling is to learn how to garden: to live at peace with creation rather than seeking to exploit it. “The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” We are called to live as God's children within the garden, where instead of exploitative attitudes we have reverential attitudes. We are to respect creation because it is a manifestation of our reverence and worship of the Creator himself. The basic principle is that the world and the creatures within it are inherently worthy of respect, they are not tools for us to do with as we will. In the profoundest possible way they are not external to us. The environmental crisis that we face is rooted in the spiritual crisis; the wider environment is symptomatic of our state of sin. If we persist in sin the environment will reflect that in painful ways – “therefore the land mourns”. We have to respect the integrity of creation. The roots of the problem lie in the particular scientific attitude which has made us frenetically anti-phronetic. As our culture has become more and more asophic we have lost our capacity to judge between good and evil, to listen to what God is telling us. As we have lost these practical virtues, we no longer have any sense of the way in which our agriculture is an abomination. The consequences of this are all around us.
So are we entering into the apocalypse? Our imaginations, how we understand God, who we understand God to be, whether we picture in our hearts and minds God as someone angry, seeking to punish and chastise, or whether we see God as someone loving and merciful, seeking to bring us into life – this is where our real spiritual work needs to be done. Our imaginations need to be renewed in the light of Christ, who He was and how He taught. So let us spend some time understanding what Jesus taught about the end of the world.